


Unmasked

by dimtraces



Series: Runaways 'verse [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (which is mostly an accident), Aftermath of Non-Consensual Magical Body Modification, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Dysphoria, Gen, Maul and Savage are fairly good for each other, Strangulation, the Bargaining Stage of Grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 12:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10536888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: Somewhere between the heavy orange sunrise and the shuttle door, Savage begins to glue back together the rubble of his self.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: mentions of past fratricide, strangulation (see the last story for details), dysphoria and minor self-harm/ dermatillomania.

Through the Sheathipede’s small grimy ‘fresher window, the Nal Hutta sun coats the body’s reflection in its thick orange molasses. It shines on the amulet he’ll never take off, and mixes with its comforting green glow. It lights up the burns scored across the arms during yesterday’s live saberstaff training session, and the small patches of stinging burn salve he put on them afterwards, the salve he was taught to make by the long-dead brother who raised him.

For a moment, the dawn-drenched skin looks almost like— _no_.

He shakes his head, and the reflection follows, a particularly determined mimic almost flawless in its mockery. Thinking of these arms and Feral in the same moment feels wrong, the same squirming sense of unease that accompanies every look in the mirror, every glimpse at those arms.

The whole body is a dead loss. It is too hard and big and square now, and not malleable at all. Stiff all over. Even the small pouch of fat below the bellybutton has rotted away. No food will bring it back.

No amount of looking at it will change that, so Savage doesn’t look, often.

Instead of applying the salve to his burned arms again, he focuses of the face: early morning penance for a crime he can only half-remember, and cannot forget.

+

_(“Savage, a word?” Brother Stinger said when they came back before the Blood-Moon Feast, and he quickly dropped Feral’s hand, as if he had just noticed that it was on fire._

_He gave his best smile for his anxious little brother, thinking urgently and knowing better than to speak,_ Run along home. Don’t argue for once. I’ll come soon, and bring the burn aloe. I’m not in trouble… not new trouble, anyway, _and miraculously, Feral obeyed. Savage watched him run off for a moment too long._

_“He’s fifteen,” Stinger said then. He was old and wrinkled in the way that is rare for a nightbrother, and his cataracts bored into Savage. The disapproval wrinkled his head even more._

_“I know.”_

_“You’re spoiling the boy.”_

_“I know,” Savage repeated. There was no use volunteering more words for the scolding he was sure to get._

_“Are you sure you’re doing this for him? You’re making him soft, boy. The world is not soft. You are his protector now, Savage, but you won’t always be alive. Do you think you’re doing your brother a favor, when he cannot live without you? You’re going to be the death of him!”_

_Savage nodded, and went home._

_He didn’t think of those words when he bandaged Feral’s arms that night and kissed the scratched knuckles better. They were old words, and he’d agreed to them a hundred times—agreeing with the Elders was the easiest way to get out of a conversation, after all. But Feral was strong, it wasn’t_ him _who wouldn’t survive the loss of his brother, and Savage had decided long ago that there would be enough time for fear yet in his brother’s life. He hadn’t met the Sisters in years._

_He remembered the words in the arena five days later, Feral trembling behind his back and the Sister’s blade before him._

_He remembered the words in the Mother’s home. He thought of the moonshine Stinger always drank to sleep, ever since he’d managed to limp back into the village from wherever the Sisters had taken him. He was the only one of his year-mates to have survived all his trials. He thought of Stinger warbling, “What’s the use talking, Resh? They’ll all be dead soon,” leaning onto Brother Irascible in the night, the one man in the village who still liked him. He remembered Stinger and thought,_ This will be me.

_He didn’t remember the words when they brought in Feral after the ritual. He was already nothing by then. He was powerful. He was murky and trembling beneath heavy magic and anger. There were no words in him but the Mother’s words when She said, “Now for the final test. Kill him,” and when he moved and massive hands wrapped around Feral’s throat and held him up, and when he dropped the corpse._

_There were no words for a long time. It’s good that there weren’t._ You’re going to be the death of him. _What would he have done if he’d remembered? Laugh?_

 _He forgot them until Maul stood before him one day, and ordered him to get up and stop feeling sorry for himself, “It’s just a training injury. What are you, weak?” The words rang through his core:_ You’re making your brother soft, boy, but the world is not soft. _It was strange to think he was the spoiled one, now. When he complied and stood up,_ _Maul ordered him to sit down again, angry—it turned out he was too short to reach Savage’s neck otherwise—and then he wrapped his hands around Savage’s throat._

_“I promised you I would teach you the dark arts of the Sith, didn’t I?” Maul said, his grin rigid and pale and much older than his face. “Fear is your ally. Feel the air leave you. If you deserve to live, you’ll find the strength to fight back in your fear.”_

_Savage swallowed against the pressure, and he looked at his brother’s face until his eyes went black, and he loved him still.)_

+

He prods the cheek. It’s warm and firm under his hand—there is no reason at all why it should be waxy. Why would he assume that it might be? It’s not like he _killed_ —this flesh is still livid with blood, the same way it was yesterday. The same way it was last year. The same way it was, before the life was strangled from it a ten-day ago. Before Maul took him by his neck _,_ before he learned intimately just what he did to his other brother. What Feral felt.

Only, Maul is better than Savage could ever hope to be, and he stopped.

 _This_ flesh is not…

_(Savage never even got to bury his brother’s corpse.)_

He picks at the skin, at the pores and the discreet scabs that have built up from last night. He pushes at the cartilage of the nose. No, not yet. Not this. He moves on, seeking the edges of his skin-mask so he can tear it off, and the fingernails leave three deep pale crescents, stinging lightly with the acidic ointment on his fingers. Fresh little wounds, to pick at tomorrow.

He pinches and pulls, and there it is! Just for a second, the lines move into place.

Just for a second, his own eyes stare back.

He holds on for as long as he can, until the pads of his fingers grow numb and the face burns up with pressure, and then he lets go. The face settles back into its new default state.

Once again, Savage looks at the eyes of a stranger in the ‘fresher mirror.

It is fitting that he stands here now, he thinks, homeless in this deformed body. He isn’t who he thought he was: Feral’s big brother. His protector. His… murderer. He is nothing, now.

He doesn’t know how he could have taken if for granted, for all those years on Dathomir. Being home. Having a face! He has only been wearing his not-face atop this wrong body for two years, and he can’t believe there used to be a time when he could see himself, and not _notice_. No jolt of shock at his reflection, no flinch at his own raised hands, no need to consciously reassure himself that this is him, now. Just existing.

If he can forget his old miraculous comfort so easily, will he forget his old face soon, too? Will he seep into this body as deeply as he lived in the one the Mother didn’t give to him? Soon, he won’t even remember the face that Maul used to see as a child.

The thought scares him.

Hands frantically push at the meat again.

 _It scares him, yes,_ Savage decides suddenly. _But it should have been a good thing, this new face._ It should have been a mercy. It wasn’t _his_ face that Feral looked at, when he was strangled. The hands that wrung the life from him didn’t—don’t—belong to Feral’s brother.

It should have been good. If only he _knew_. If only there was some confirmation that Feral had looked upon those hands and beyond the black marks, barely aligned the way they should be on the Mother’s mockery… that Feral had looked, and seen: They are the hands of a stranger. They are not Savage’s hands. He didn’t fail as protector— _he_ didn’t—he failed, but they weren’t _his_ …

He shakes his head, and the patterned thing that lives in the mirror moves.

Feral must have known they weren’t Savage’s hands. The wrongness of his body is so obvious that even Savage can spot it, and Feral had always been much more clear-eyed than him.

_(That’s why Savage had started bringing him along to hunts in the first place, when Feral was four. It’s what he’d told the Elders, in any case—it certainly wasn’t that he just wasn’t ready to leave his new baby brother behind, yet. Anyway, it was true that Feral would always spot the veeka-birds first. He’d see them when they were still only a vague blur in Savage’s eyes, and he’d bend close from his spot on Savage’s shoulders and whisper in Savage’s ear, so that his big brother with his bigger voice could announce it to the group._

_Savage would get a pat on the head then, and second choice of the pickings after the hunt._

_They made a very good team, until Feral got too heavy to carry around all the time, and too annoyed with Savage for always stealing his praise.)_

Feral would take one look at him now, and say, “That is not my brother. The marks are wrong. My brother doesn’t look like that.”

He’d _understand_.

Savage wishes Feral was here.

He wishes he was _home_.

It’s a useless wish, born of the softness the Elders always saw and despised in him. The Mother will never suffer him to return to his village again. Not after he failed to bring her Maul. Feral is dead. They weren’t his hands _—a scream echoes through the emptiness of Her magic, “No! Brother! Brother, please,” and then: deafening silence, and the Mother’s approving hand on taut trembling flesh—_ they weren’t his hands, but in the end, that doesn’t change anything.

He’s the only one left to remember.

But he isn’t alone, Savage tells himself firmly. He still has—

That’s when the durasteel of the ‘fresher door punches him in the back.

“Savage, where are y—” Maul trails off, and then gathers himself again to snarl incredulously, “Burn salve, apprentice? It was _one_ training session!”

But Savage has turned around just in time to watch him start talking.

He’s seen Maul’s expression change.

For a moment, there was frantic fear written in the patterns of Maul’s face.

It was washed away quickly by his brother’s condescension, and then Maul’s anger when Savage couldn’t help but smile at him… but Savage has hummed his day away in the kitchen, trying to wring flavor from the meal packs and ration bars Maul insists they eat. He’s looked up aimlessly, lost in concentration, and seen a red-black arm lurking behind the edge of the door. Whenever he’s wandered off from the shuttle, scavenging for mice or earthworms, there were thick black boots following at the edge of his vision. _(Coincidences, they are nothing but coincidences, that’s what he is told the one time he attempts to point it out. Maul is always full of transparent shifting excuses before he remembers he is not accountable to his apprentice.)_

Savage has woken up in the deep of the night and crouched over Maul’s floor-nest.

He has fed his tied-up brother and watched him accept whatever he’s been given. He’s walked into the cockpit, or the kitchen, or leaned into the oil-stained reaches of the engine room, and seen the tiny flinch his brother gives him before his eyes manage to focus, and the cowled pale monster that lives in Maul’s head dissipates.

He’s seen the fear a thousand times, and the anger at directed at himself when Maul realizes it’s just Savage, Savage who always bangs the doors and who sometimes moves closer and holds too tightly onto his brother’s wrist in the night.

Yes, Savage has seen his brother’s face.

He doesn’t need to see anything else to _know_.

_(You’re making him soft, boy. The world is not soft… but Maul has already had enough people in his life who tried to make him strong.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately, as I've found out while failing to finish this story for a month, waiting to become a better writer so I can do the story I've made up justice doesn't actually work. Sad. On the plus side, I've finally worked out where Runaways 'verse is going (yes, I know, very fast) & there should be about five more parts of this story. It's all going downhill for them pretty soon... so here's a scene where they have a little time to breathe, and mope.
> 
> Thanks everyone who reads this and also people who read/kudosed/commented on the other parts of this series, you make me incredibly happy! It's nice to know that I'm not in this hole completely alone. Thank-you very much, I love you!


End file.
